Thursday, July 21, 2016

Men Have Better Brains Than Chicks & Larry Summers, As Prez Of Harvard, Was Fired For Pointing Out This Fact (Misogynist Blogger Sez)

STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. Women are not as good as men in these fields. That's just genetics. Or so says the Libertarian blogger Willis Hart.

Willis Hart: On the Fact that (According to Numerous Researchers; Voyer, Voyer, Bryden, Lytton, Romney, Pinker, etc.) A) Men Appear to Have Better 3-D Mental Transformations (i.e., Spatial Abilities) and Mathematics Problem-Solving Skills than Women Do and B) These Differences Are at Least Partially Genetic.

So Larry Summers got shit-canned from Harvard back in 2006 for telling the truth, in other words. Gotta love it.

P.S. And yes, these of course are averages. A lot of girls do well in math and the physical sciences and we should appreciate them as well (they also score better than men on many verbal indices and perhaps that's the reason why they gravitate more toward social work and education than the STEM fields). (5/31/2016 AT 5:13pm).

First of all, former Secretary of the Treasury (under Bill Clinton) Larry Summers was NOT fired from Harvard for "telling the truth".

According to the following Wikipedia excerpt, the speech (the one in which he "told the truth") was only one factor (and may actually not been a factor at all).

Following the end of Clinton's term, Summers served as the 27th President of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. Summers resigned as Harvard's president in the wake of a no-confidence vote by Harvard faculty, which resulted in large part from: Summers's conflict with Cornel West; financial conflict of interest questions regarding his relationship with Andrei Shleifer; and a 2005 speech in which he suggested that the underrepresentation of women in science and engineering could be due to a "different availability of aptitude at the high end", and less to patterns of discrimination and socialization (Wikipedia/Lawrence Summers).

I say "may not have been a factor at all" because nobody knows why each individual Harvard faculty member voted the way they did. IMO it was the "conflict of interest questions regarding his relationship with Andrei Shleifer" that probably lead to the "no confidence" more than any other factor.

Some people still think Larry Summers got fired from being the president of Harvard because of the ridiculous comments he made about women in math... or because of the comments he made about Cornel West. Actually, the truth is something worse, and for which he should actually be in jail.

Summers was directly involved with defrauding the U.S. Government... and Russia. He admitted to not understand conflict of interest issues. ... So why did Summers lose his job at Harvard? It was because of his protecting a buddy, a fellow economist at Harvard named Andrei Shleifer. Shleifer got in trouble, and the US Government sued and won against Harvard and Shleifer... Harvard was required to pay $26.5 million to the U.S. government, Shleifer $2 million... (Why Larry Summers lost the presidency of Harvard by Cathy O'Neil. Mathbabe 3/11/2012).

You can read the article for the details (my excerpt would have to be a LOT longer to fully explain what happened). The important thing to note is that "Summers was good friends with this criminal [Andrei Shleifer], and used his position to protect him".

Summers was "shit-canned" (resigned after a no confidence vote) for protecting the job of his friend, a friend who had cost Harvard "$26.5 million and legal fees estimated at between $10 million and $15 million for legal violations".

I don't know about you, but I think a 36.5 to 41 million dollar loss is more likely the reason than the speech, regardless of whether or not it was the "truth".

Secondly, as far as the underrepresentation of Women in the STEM fields being due to genetics or not, my judgement is... it could be a factor. But there are other factors. Wikipedia notes that "scholars are exploring the various reasons for the existence of this gender gap in STEM fields. [There are a] number of biological, structural, and social-psychological explanations".

But Willis (in a number of posts on his blog) points only to research from academics who look at the possible biological reasons. "Men have better brains" seems (to me) to be the point he's trying to make. A point that would be in line with the many other misogynistic commentaries he's authored on his blog.

Supporting Document
[DSD #27] Men's Brains Are Better Than Women's Brains (catalouge of WTNPH commentaries in which he makes this implicit argument).